I just got the system up and running and would like to uninstall some of the programs that I would never use. Whenever I choose the program from the menue and click on uninstall, a pop-up window appears showing the program that I want to uninstall, but also shows "mint-meta-mate". Is this a program that is needed and why does it show up for every uninstall?? It took at least a dozen attempts to install the system and I don't want to mess it up now.

A meta-package is just a list of packages that is used for conveniently installing a group of related packages. It is a dummy package that works by creating a fake list of dependencies. When you try to uninstall programs that are part of that list, it makes you remove the list, because the program is a required dependency for the meta-package itself. Removing a meta-package will not harm anything, because you aren't removing a real program, just a listing of programs that were installed together.